Hans Romine finished his architecture degree in 2025 and started applying for jobs. He was 24. He sent out about 50 applications and got one interview, a 2% hit rate, which is about what you’d get from cold emails and slightly worse than you’d get from a lottery ticket in a good year. He was getting despondent when a friend pointed him to a show called 877UNMPLYD.

The show streams on Twitch, which is mostly where people watch other people play video games. Its host is not who you’d expect there. As Juliana Kaplan reported for Business Insider, the show is hosted by Jeremy Zimmer, the former CEO of United Talent Agency, along with Rachel Braun, a producer who knows her way around the internet. They give career advice, talk through labor market news and take live calls from people looking for work. The name is the phone number. According to the show’s site, it goes out live on Tuesdays at noon Pacific.

When Romine called in, he mentioned that he had spent a few months as a recreation supervisor at an isolated research station in Antarctica, where his job was to build morale. Zimmer and Braun decided that was the most interesting thing in his whole story and told him to lead with it in applications and interviews. He did. At that one interview, he talked up his time on the ice. He got the job, and then he called the show back to tell them.

I find this very satisfying, because it is exactly what you’d expect a talent agent to say. The whole business of a Hollywood agency is taking a person and figuring out what about them is sellable. Plenty of people have architecture degrees. Not many have spent months keeping up morale at a research station at the bottom of the world. Imagine you’re a hiring manager reading your 40th application of the day from someone with roughly the same degree and the same internship. The one with Antarctica on it gets read. Tubefilter, which wrote up Zimmer’s new gig, noted that he co-founded UTA, so packaging people is a skill he has practiced for a long time.

Anyway, the first season ran 12 episodes. The one shot live on the streets of New York got more than 54,000 views. In August, Zimmer and Braun put a desk on a plaza at Baruch College with a sign reading “Ask a CEO” and took questions from students. One asked how to handle salary expectations, especially during interviews. Not everyone who calls is a recent graduate. Braun said one caller was a Gen X marketer who had been laid off and felt pushed out of the tech industry.

The numbers behind it

Here’s why a show like this exists. In October, the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit business advocacy group, published a report finding that entry-level jobs have shrunk the most in the professions most exposed to AI. Since ChatGPT came out in 2022, yearly entry-level postings have fallen 40.6% in design, media and writing, 34.4% in customer and client support, 30.5% in clerical and administrative work, 26.8% in business management and operations, and 23.4% in finance. Meanwhile, entry-level postings that ask for AI skills are up 55%. Put plainly, employers still want junior people, just fewer of the ones who do the tasks and more of the ones who supervise the software doing the tasks.

The awkward part for the city is that AI money is pouring in. AI companies leased more than 2.2 million square feet of New York office space in the first half of 2026, according to the Partnership. Over the same stretch, employment through August rose just 0.6% in financial services and 0.04% in professional and business services. So the offices are filling up with AI companies while the junior hiring isn’t keeping pace.

Some caution is in order. A posting is not a hire, and a 40.6% drop in postings measures what employers advertised, not who got hired. The report doesn’t claim AI alone caused the slowdown. Business Insider adds that nationally, white-collar employment has fallen even as output has risen, which it says suggests AI “might be” replacing entry-level white-collar work. “Might” is doing real work there. As we wrote last month, the AI jobs apocalypse for new graduates has so far been hard to find in the broader data. But if you’re the one sending out 50 applications, the broader data isn’t much comfort.

Who pays for it

The show is a partnership between Adam Faze, whom Business Insider calls a TikTok savant, and the Schultz Family Foundation, an economic mobility nonprofit. Judith Dubin, the foundation’s head of content, said it had focused its spending on career navigation after seeing how hard it is to graduate from high school or college into this job market.

“The current job marketplace is so disrupted with the advent of AI. It’s just an additional barrier for young people.”

Going into the show, Zimmer thought about what it’s like when keeping your head down, working hard and expecting things to work out is no longer enough to land a job. “That age-old mantra doesn’t feel as relevant today,” he said. He has noticed two kinds of callers. Some are hyper-focused on what they want and not at all worried about why they might not get it. Others are baffled that hundreds of applications haven’t produced a single interview. He finds both the naivety and the determination exciting, which is a very agent-like thing to find exciting.

Braun said AI came up again and again across the first season, both as an opportunity and as the thing upending the entry-level job hunt.

Romine, now employed, hopes employers will come back around to the value of fresh talent. Until then, he said, “students and graduates need to really figure out how to work the current system and make themselves stand out in such an intense market.”

That’s sound advice, with one catch: standing out works because most people don’t. If a whole graduating class gets told to lead with its most distinctive story, the hiring manager’s pile turns into 200 Antarctica anecdotes. Then, presumably, everyone will have to call back in.